During the past years, the evolution of the communication networks and the processors for computing devices such as computers, mobile phones, game consoles, personal digital assistants, etc., has resulted in large bandwidth connections being available in homes and video files being watched on various devices connected to the communication networks. Thus, today it becomes more customarily to watch video content on a computer, to play online games, etc.
One example of a system for transporting video content (for example, TV content) to a computer is the Internet Protocol Television (IPTV). IPTV is a system where a digital television service is delivered using Internet Protocol (IP) over a network infrastructure, which may include delivery by a broadband connection. A general definition of IPTV is television content that, instead of being delivered through traditional broadcast and cable formats, is received by the viewer through the technologies used for computer networks.
IPTV may be supplied by a service provider using a closed network infrastructure. The network infrastructure may be wireless, wired or a combination of the two. When at least a part of the network infrastructure is wireless, more types of user devices may be enabled to receive the IPTV content, i.e., mobile phones or other mobile devices. Similar to the conventional TV, the service provider is able to insert into the video content streams of advertisements that target the audience.
However, it is desired that the advertisements are personalized for the users such that they are more efficient. For example, one way to provide personalized ads for telecommunication IPTV is to insert, based on a device to be discussed next, streams containing advertisements into the main TV stream during time periods allocated to commercials. For this purpose, video slicing equipment may be used. FIG. 1 shows a network architecture of an intelligent video gateway (IVG) 10 that can personalize ads delivery to users. The system 10 shown in FIG. 1 is provided by Scopus Video Networks, Princeton, N.J., USA.
This system 10 includes a master headend 12 and a remote headend 14 connected to the master headend 12. The master headend 12 is configured to communicate with various entities. For example, the master headend 12 is connected to a video server 16 that provides video data. The master headend 12 is also connected to an ITV server 18 for supporting interactive TV. The master headend 12 may be connected to a Network Management System (NMS) 20 for managing traffic from and to the IP network 22. An encoding unit 22 may provide the desired encoding to the master headend 12. The remote headend 14 is connected to a TV set 24, to an ad server 26 and to a local content provider 28. The ad server 26 may store and provide on request desired ads to be distributed by the remote headend 14 to the TV set 24. The local content provider 28 may provide the remote headend 14 with local content to be distributed to the TV set 24.
The IVG 10 shown in FIG. 1 acts as a video stream ‘switch’ taking as input several video streams and outputting a stream based on a set of operator configured policies. The remote headend 14 of the IVG 10 takes as input not only content from the master headend 12 and local content from the local content provider 28 but also content from the ad server 26. Thus, the IVG 10 enables the delivery of personalized advertisements to users.
However, personalizing the ads distributed to the user is a challenge to the service providers as the granularity of the end viewer is desired to be fine for such systems. The finer the granularity, the more revenue that could be expected by the service providers. If multicast is used to deliver the ad streams, as conventionally performed, then coarse granularity is achieved, which is not desired. Unicast enables achieving a granularity of a single household but the price and infrastructure for this is high as the streaming server would have to serve as many unicast sessions as the number of distinct end viewers. The bandwidth and server scalability requirements of such system would be prohibitively high given the fact that the server needs large bandwidth for both the server needs and for the extra bandwidth incurred in the aggregation network because the server sends multiple unicasts throughout the whole aggregation network.
Another problem with ad insertions into live streams is that the existing equipment required is expensive in both cost and maintenance and requires extensive configuration. Because the ads are inserted in realtime, the reliability of the system is expected to be high, which further increases the cost of such a system.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide devices, systems and methods that avoid the afore-described problems and drawbacks.